The Indiana State Department of Health has been collecting babies’ blood and DNA without their parents’ permission since 1991, according to an investigation by a local news station. Now the state wants to know what to do with the blood samples.

When a baby is born in Indiana, as with other states, the state conducts a newborn screening test. A nurse or midwife takes a few drops of blood from the heel of each infant. The blood is collected on a specialized filter paper, which is then sent to the state’s Newborn Screening Lab in downtown Indianapolis.

An Indiana National Guardsman was arrested outside Columbus on New Year’s Day after a state trooper found nearly 50 bombs and the blueprints for a Navy SEAL training facility inside his car, the Madison County prosecutor said yesterday.

Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, also had a remote-control device to detonate the bombs, Madison County Prosecutor Stephen Pronai said. Boguslawski’s civilian job is as a groundskeeper at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana. Prosecutors could not say definitively yesterday whether the blueprints in his car were for the facility where he worked.

Who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground? A 75-year-old farmer takes the agricultural giant to court to find out

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.

Fourteen states are represented by at least two competing petitions. The extra efforts from two states — Missouri and South Carolina — would add enough petitions to warrant reviews by the Obama administration if they were combined into petitions launched earlier.

WASHINGTON: At least 20 US states have filed petitions to secede following the re-election of Barack Obama.

Following the re-election, several petitions surfaced requesting the Obama administration to peacefully grant the applied state to withdraw from the United States of America in order to create their own government.

Louisiana was the first state to file a petition followed by Texas.

States with secession-related petitions on the White House website now include Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Do you want to see where this country is headed? If so, don’t focus on the few areas that are still very prosperous. New York City has Wall Street, Washington D.C. has the federal government and Silicon Valley has Google and Facebook. Those are the exceptions. The reality is that most of the country has been experiencing a slow decline for a very long time and once thriving cities such as Gary, Indiana and Flint, Michigan have become absolute hellholes. They are examples of what the rest of America will look like soon. 60 years ago, most Americans were decent, hard working people and there were always good jobs available for anyone that was willing to roll up his or her sleeves and put in an honest day of work. But now all of that has changed. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities have shut down and millions of jobs have left the country. Cities such as Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit were once shining examples of everything that was right about America, but now they stand out like festering sores. The “blue collar cities” have been hit the hardest by the gutting of our economic infrastructure. There are many communities in America today where it seems like all of the hope and all of the life have been sucked right out of them. You can see it in the eyes of the people. The good times are gone permanently and they know it. Unfortunately, the remainder of the country will soon be experiencing the despair that those communities are feeling.

The following are 12 hellholes that are examples of what the rest of America will look like soon….

The red glare of the rocket; the bursting of bombs; the silencing of sports fans? A college in Indiana says that “The Star Spangled Banner” is a tad too violent and won’t let the US National Anthem be heard at school games this season.

Administrators at Goshen College, a small Mennonite school in the American Midwest, say that Francis Scott Key’s wartime opus isn’t appropriate for the ideals the college believes in.

“We recognize that some people may not be satisfied with this decision, but we believe it is the right one for Goshen College,” Goshen’s chairman of the board of directors, Rick Stiffney, says in a written statement. A press release from the school adds that the college’s Christ-centered core value of compassionate peacemaking conflicts with the violence depicted in the anthem, and that therefore it is in the best interest to retire the song from sporting events.

The lyrics of the historic tune were nixed last year in favor of an instrumental version, but now Goshen officials have decided to ban the tune entirely.

That age-old writing method you might never have used since fourth grade will no longer be taught in Indiana schools come fall, thanks to a memo from school officials. Instead, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.

Seems like a smart move as being able to type efficiently is a vital skill in today’s world, as opposed to knowing how to write cursive, which — like being able to churn butter and knowing how to hitch a horse to a wagon — is no longer needed.

But it might not mean the end of cursive entirely in the state. The directive from the state’s Department of Education allows schools to decide for themselves whether to continue teaching cursive or disband the archaic practice altogether.

NewsFeed has just one question: How will Indiana’s students know how to sign their name?

Legislators in at least ten states have introduced bills in the past few years to allow state commerce to be conducted with gold and silver.

As we reported, Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin (R) recently reintroduced legislation to force his state to conduct all monetary transactions with U.S. gold or silver coins — including the payment of taxes.

The United States Constitution declares, in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”. But, in fact, EVERY state in the United States of America DOES make some other “Thing” besides gold and silver coin a “Tender in Payment of Debts” — some “Thing” called “Federal Reserve Notes.” Thus the need for the “Constitutional Tender Act” — a bill template that can be introduced in every state legislature in the nation, returning each of them to adherence to the United States Constitution’s actual legal tender provisions.

Time is running out for the legislatures in Arizona, California, Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania to solve budget gaps.

Reporting from Indianapolis and Denver — The last time Indiana missed its deadline for passing a budget and had to shut down the government was during the Civil War.

But on Monday, as lawmakers raced to hammer out an agreement over school funding, state agencies began preparing 31,000 workers to be temporarily out of a job. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels has warned residents that most of the state’s services — including its parks, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and state-regulated casinos — would be shuttered unless a budget is passed today.

Indiana is one of five states — along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets.

Of the 46 states whose fiscal year ends today, 32 did not have budgets passed and approved by their governors as of Monday afternoon, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although the majority of those are expected to pass eleventh-hour budgets, the fiscal futures of a handful remain uncertain, said Todd Haggerty, an NCSL research analyst.

“It’s a lot of states that are coming down to the wire,” Haggerty said. “It’s far more than we’ve seen in the past, and it’s because of the state of the economy.”